My late mum was a professional calligrapher, and had some of the most beautiful casual handwriting I’ve ever seen. My sister also has lovely writing, as does Clara. I have what can best be described as scrawl . There was a point in the late 2010s where I hadn’t written anything for so long I’d even started to lose some of the muscle memory, which I didn’t even think was possible. I used to joke that the only words I ever wrote were on immigration cards when travelling, and even then I...

I was recently listening to an episode of The Idea Roastery about personal life gamechangers and toward the end of the episode, Herman asked Jason: What is the best purchase you've ever made for less than £100? For Jason is was an egg poacher, and for Herman it was a coffee grinder. This discussion got me thinking about what mine was, and I really wasn't sure at first. But after some thought, it hit me. It's my dog, Tia! She's getting old now, at nearly 14 years of age. But m...

Students playing Gimkit remotely often miss the shared classroom leaderboard. There’s a simple fix built into the game. Knowing how to view leaderboard on a student device in Gimkit takes one tap, and any student can do it during an active session without help from the teacher. Why Check the Leaderboard on a Student Device in Gimkit? In a physical classroom, the teacher usually displays the main leaderboard on a projector. Remote or hybrid sessions remove that shared view, so students lo...

Over on Bear Blog, Thereabouts posted “ The greatest breakfast food in existence ”. When I read the title, my face lit up. “A blog post about breakfast food!” It got me thinking about what breakfast brings me the most joy. I think the answer is waffles and coffee. This time around two years ago, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) had just been released and I was on a trip to the East Coast of the United States. I still remember the breakfasts: Waffles (almost) every day, purchased from...

I've spent the last 2 years building and interviewing candidates for AI Engineering roles. So I've been fortunate enough to watch the career track evolve from being a fringe amorphous role fueled by hype to a growing discipline in and of itself. AI Engineering as a term is still pretty fuzzy but for the purposes of this blog post, I define an AI Engineer as an engineer whose primary expertise is developing systems and solutions which integrate AI platforms and stacks. It's an intersection of sk...

Another book that I really enjoyed last year was Davies’ Lying for Money . As its subtitle says, it’s about what legendary frauds reveal about the workings of the world, and while he doesn’t discuss big tech, the parallels are inescapable; understanding the patterns of fraud laid out in Davies’ book makes it possible to see them in Silicon Valley business plans. Fraud is more common than prosecutions suggest, and its most dangerous forms are not easily recognized as fraud even by the ...

Humid air swirls with colorful spirits. They trace its invisible currents in spirals through open spaces, cling to branches, drip down stone faces and, awakened by the first beams of the rising sun, ooze newly out of trees like sap. Lulls of wind leave them gliding gently downward to be picked up again. From a distance, eddies of the spirits’ malleable confetti travel along plains. With translucent jellylike hands and fingers they wave at each other in passing or hold each other in breeze-pert...

Most anti-AI rhetoric is left-wing coded. Popular criticisms of AI describe it as a tool of techno-fascism , or appeal to predominantly left-wing concerns like carbon emissions , democracy , or police brutality . Anti-AI sentiment is surprisingly bipartisan , but the big anti-AI institutions are labor unions and the progressive wing of the Democrats. This has always seemed weird to me, because the contents of most anti-AI arguments are actually right-wing coded. They’re not nece...

Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept in the realm of databases. It's still of the relational abstraction. Or can be. As an example, say we have this data: data = [ { "name" : "Smudge" , "colour" : "black" }, { "name" : "Sissel" , "colour" : "grey" }, { "name" : "Hamlet" , "colour" : "black" } ] This represents a tab...

You’re the earliest known life form. There’s no food around right now. It would be great to go somewhere else. But you’re stuck. Really stuck. At your size (a couple of microns), water feels like tar, or rather, it feels the way being stuck in tar will eventually feel to a human. What do you do? You’ve found the perfect solution. Literally perfect. Source You’re the earliest known life form. There’s no food around right now. It would be great to go somewhere else. But you’re st...

I’m in school 1 again.  I’m going back to school because my work, my entire career, for my entire adult life, has been writing things for the Internet. That’s going away, at least as a livable career option. By livable, I mean an option I can live with .  When I started writing for the Internet, early 2000s, I could find decent paying gigs on Craigslist. A quarter a word wasn’t uncommon. It wasn’t easy — I spent a lot of time searching and researching and answering inane q...

This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months. I then recorded myself giving a version of this talk with MacWhisper , and transcribed it with Whisper locally. This part took 45 minutes (the total time of my practice run.) Then, I ran it through Gemini Flash 2.5 running in Pi to break into paragraphs. I also had Gemini break up my slid...

Our Moon and Earth captured by the Artemis II Orion spacecraft using a camera at the tip of one of its solar panels. Image: NASA There’s an unsaid rule in the space industry: the more popular a mission or a program, the more inaccurate its broader coverage and public discussions, especially by people who aren’t thinking about space everyday. NASA’s Artemis II mission and its four astronauts flying around the Moon naturally had its share of whimsical coverage and social media fluff t...

Notes on Go's newly accepted uuid proposal and the tradeoffs behind the API. Notes on Go's newly accepted uuid proposal and the tradeoffs behind the API.

Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it's always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they publish new models. Opus 4.7 shipped the other day (April 16, 2026) with a Claude.ai system prompt update since Opus 4.6 (February 5, 2026). I had Claude Code take the Markdown version of their system prompts , break that up into separa...

Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets, or the sun. While celestial navigation is accurate, cannot be jammed, and doesn't require any broadcast infrastructure, it is a difficult and time-consuming process to perform manually. In the early 1960s, an automated system was developed for the B-52 bomber to automatically track stars and compute navigation information. Digital computers weren't suitab...

It's been one of those months, and by that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post, because I only have two things to say. First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the GMI (Guaranteed Minimum Income) rural study counties so Mercer County, WV, my Dad's county, went first in October 2025. I knew dad was close to the end, and sure enough, that was the last time I ever saw him. You can kinda sorta meet my dad on this page, if you want to. Why Pledge to Share the Amer...

WASHINGTON — (April 20, 2026)  — Shield AI announced today its selection by the United States Navy to provide contractor-owned, contractor-operated (COCO) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) services in support of naval and joint force operations.    Under the Navy’s initiative to expand and modernize ISR capabilities, Shield AI will compete for up to $800 million in task orders alongside other selected industry partners, delivering persistent ISR using its V-BAT v...

How to generate and sign with SLH-DSA very quickly, with only mild side effects. How to generate and sign with SLH-DSA very quickly, with only mild side effects.

Consider the following problem. Given a string, you must match all of the ASCII white-space characters ( \t , \n , \r , and the space) and some characters important in JSON ( : , , , [ , ] , { , } ). JSON is a text-based data format used for web services. A toy JSON document looks as follows. { "name" : "Alice" , "age" : 30 , "email" : "alice@example.com" , "tags" : [ "developer" , "python" , "open-source" ], "active" : true } We want to solve...

256 Lines or Less: Test Case Minimization Apr 20, 2026 Property Based Testing and fuzzing are a deep and science-intensive topic. There are enough advanced techniques there for a couple of PhDs, a PBT daemon, and a client-server architecture . But I have this weird parlor-trick PBT library, implementable in a couple of hundred lines of code in one sitting. This week I’ve been thinking about a cool variation of a consensus algorithm. I implemented it on the weekend. And it took just ...

Path Robotics’ welding quadruped, via Nima Gard on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a quadruped welding robot, the China Shock 2.0, transformer startups, China’s mysteriously moving satellites, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but working on a more involved piece about constru...

I tried Claude Design yesterday and I have a theory for how this whole thing shakes out. As product teams scaled and design needed to justify itself inside engineering orgs, it was pushed toward systematization — and Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on. Some concepts are borrowed from programming, some aren’t, and the whole thing doesn’t neatly map onto anything. Guidance evolves, migrations pile up, and if you want to au...